


a shelter from the storm

by Skyepilot



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: Angst, Conspiracy Theories, Contingencies, Coulson loves Daisy, Daisy loves Phil, Daisy's voice, F/M, Flashbacks, Government Agencies, Government Conspiracy, Implied Sexual Content, Kissing, Phil listened to Daisy's podcasts, Phil's bad habits, Phil's sad life before Daisy, Project TAHITI, Resolved Sexual Tension, Speculation, Trust Issues, Unresolved Sexual Tension, the Rising Tide - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-08
Updated: 2015-11-08
Packaged: 2018-04-30 16:00:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,258
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5169851
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Skyepilot/pseuds/Skyepilot
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Daisy and her voice and Coulson knowing her before he died and after. </p><p>Title from Josh Garrells' 'White Owl': Building you into a home, A shelter from the storm</p>
            </blockquote>





	a shelter from the storm

**Author's Note:**

> //// present   
> \\\\\\\ past

“None of this makes sense.”

Closing the folder in front of her, she tosses it across the table and finishes the last bite of her sandwich.

“There’s a pattern here. I know it,” she goes on, with a frustrated sigh. “Just can’t see the connections.”

She shakes her head and picks up her coffee cup.

“I’m sure you’re tired of hearing my conspiracy theories,” she says at his silence, pressing her thumb against a tired eye.

Her face disappears for a moment behind the mug and her hair as she slumps back into the chair, her knees against the table.

“I have a confession to make.”

“What?” she asks, putting the mug down and looking back over at him.

“I used to listen to your… conspiracy theories before,” he hesitates. “You know…”

Before he died, he means, but he doesn’t need to mention that.

She looks quite surprised at this, and blinks a few times, thinking it over.

“You mean my Rising Tide podcasts?” she answers, like he’s the one with the wild ideas now.

He looks down, feeling a little foolish, holding his own still-warm coffee cup in his hand, twisting it between his fingers against the tabletop.

Late night confessions. What was he thinking?

“Phil,” she finally prods, sounding amused.

He looks up and she’s leaning forward on her elbows towards him, hands wrapped around her arms.

Curious.

“I liked some of the stuff you had to say,” he starts to explain. “Even if you…kind of hated SHIELD.”

She smiles at his smile, and she leans forward a little further, and he feels like everything slows down.

“I think that’s quite possibly the most flattering thing anyone has ever said to me.”

Time stops.

She looks like she might start to laugh at any moment, and time starts again, but there’s something shining in her eyes.

It reminds him of that night, when they were by the motel pool. After they’d escaped together from Ward.

God, even though their lives were so crazy then, why did it seem simpler?

“That’s sad,” he answers, frowning over at her. Then again, he knows her life has never been easy, but surely someone...

“Why?” she teases, putting her hands out in front of her between them on the table. “Why is it so sad?”

“Because, there have to be other, more flattering things someone has-“

He stops as his eyes follow her getting up from the table holding her mug.

“I’m going to get more coffee,” she says, from behind him, leaning down so that her lips are next to his ear.

“But I’d love to hear more.”

He can practically feel her smile curling against his ear.

“Can I get you some?” she asks, putting her fingers lightly on his shoulder.

That’s when he realizes his hand is curled too tightly around the cup.

“Sure,” he says, handing it over his shoulder to her, even though it’s half-full.

He hears her leave, and all he can think about is how compartmentalization doesn’t work with her.

It never has.

 

\\\\\\\

There’s a list he has. A routine.

Probably some control issues, he’s sure. But it works for someone who has to deal with random chaos in the world, and make it all fit inside their red tape.

No one else gets to have that kind of red tape. The sort that ends with SHIELD.

Sometimes he wonders about that red tape, too.

He’s also pretty sure he hates Tony Stark, even if Fury thinks he has his uses.

Let’s see, get together stuff for the dry cleaners, make dinner.

What kind of spy offers to feed the neighbor’s cat when they’re out of town? Me.

Or, eat the leftovers from last night?

He’ll come back to that.

His hand goes in his pocket to empty it, and he feels the flash drive there.

The Rising Tide.

Sitwell told him about it, just because he knows how he’ll get once an idea is stuck in his head.

An anarchist hacker group, he called them, but that could just be an exaggeration. There’s a lot of people in SHIELD who don’t like people who push back.

As if SHIELD are the only people trying to do good in the world.

It was enough of a tease for him to put some of the podcasts on a thumb drive and bring it home with him.

He goes to the fridge and cracks a beer, then fishes the drive out of his pocket and sits down to open up his laptop.

 

////

“Says the guy who believed the girl, who believed in aliens, even when no one was supposed to know there were aliens.”

“I don’t think leaking information about Lash is a good idea,” Coulson replies. “And technically, you are part alien.”

She shines the flashlight directionally as he pulls open the server board and she hands him over the eavesdropping bug.

“Says the guy who’s part alien.”

“Cute,” he says, finishing up, then pushing the board back into its slot.

Sounding a little frustrated, but it’s not because of the reason she thinks.

“Time?”

“All good,” she answers. “No one seems too worried about making humans panic.”

Picking right back up where she left off, and here he was being distracted by her flirty banter.

“You know I tried to advise her against that,” he says, as they walk quietly down the hallway.

Price leaking info about Lincoln being alien on national television was a bad idea. And now Daisy wants to counter it by suggesting Inhumans are being hunted.

Which is true.

“Don’t you mean ‘Rosalind’?”

“Yes,” he says, “I am talking about Rosalind Price. Who, by the way, probably wouldn’t appreciate what I’m doing right now.”

“I do,” she says, grabbing him back by the arm as they’re about to turn the corner.

Don’t want to bump into White House security detail.

“Maybe if this SHIELD gig doesn’t work out, the Rising Tide will take me?” he whispers, cocky.

She raises her finger up to his mouth and he can tell just by the way she goes quiet, she’s using her powers to listen for vibrations in the hall.

Nodding the okay, she grins at him in the low light.

“You’d do.”

He rolls his eyes and follows after her.

 

\\\\\\\

He likes to listen to them when he thinks they air live, even though they’ll end up in SHIELD archives.

Sometimes he’ll repeat the same one, several times, depending on the topic.

The Rising Tide is now officially on their radar, and someone connected to them (at least they suspect) has been trying to actively hack SHIELD.

Tossing his jacket across the back of the armchair, he loosens his tie, then rolls up his sleeves and picks up the headphones from their spot on the bookshelf.

Then he sits back on the couch, takes the chocolate bar off the coffee table, and starts to unwrap it.

He turns up his laptop’s audio and listens.

There’s an interesting quality to her voice. Nice pitch. Probably can sing if she tried.

He wonders if she does. What kind of music she likes.

She must have a cold or something because it sounds a little scratchy tonight.

Then she mentions Puente Antiguo, and an alien cover up and the work of astrophysicist Jane Foster and he sits up.

She’s talking about him.

Wow.

What a small world.

 

////

“Plausible deniability.”

“What?!”

“If they can’t trace this back to you,” he begins, following her across the hangar, “If you’ve never touched it, you can’t be blamed for it, either.”

SHIELD. ACTU. The White House. HYDRA. Inhumans.

Just like she told him once, they can see the pattern but not the connections.

No concrete evidence. So he set bait.

“But you can?” she says, pushing past him to punch keys on the wall panel, pulling up the info on the files that were downloaded.

He realizes then, she’s been tracking this for a while, not sure who the leak came from inside SHIELD.

And she never said a word. Never confronted him directly.

Did she not want to believe that he could do this?

“You have more to lose than I do,” he answers quietly.

“And you actually believe that?” she asks, turning on him, anger dripping from her voice.

He didn’t ask for any of this, but he needed a contingency.

“When are you going to stop trying to carry the weight of this all on your own?” she asks in frustration.

Or disappointment. How can she not see?

She used to see him so clearly.

“What happened to SHIELD having no right to keep information from the public?” he snaps.

“Don’t throw that back at me,” she says, stepping closer to him. “I thought we weren’t keeping any more secrets?”

There’s no way to make her understand now, is there? That’s almost everything he wants. It’s such a temptation.

“What I don’t want,” he says, feeling the ire rise in him. “Is for this to stop with me.”

They’ve always had the same goal.

It’s just another means to an end.

 

\\\\\\\

He wonders what she would think of him now?

To Audrey, he’d just be a disappointment. Not the man she thought he was.

A fantasy, maybe, that was always doomed to evaporate if it became too real, and the idea of her ever being burdened with the knowledge of this isn’t something he can bear.

No, she, would expose him and Project: TAHITI.

There would be no explanation that could cover over what they’ve done here.

What he has done.

Even with the best of intentions, it’s…mortifying.

Were they trying to help, or did they need a contingency?

One with too high of a price.

He has to resign, if he wants to even be able to live with himself.

 

////

“I’m still mad. FYI.”

“Fair enough.”

“At myself,” she says, and it surprises him. He doesn’t want to hope too much, though.

“Any job offers?” she asks, squinting back at him through his aviators, as the desert wind blows her hair around her like a halo.

“Waiting for that call from the Rising Tide. Any day now.”

She smiles back at him. “You’d be on the A-Team for sure after that stunt. It’s kind of complicated, though.”

“Yeah. Playing dead again sort of limits my options,” he nods.

He looks at the SHIELD insignia on her uniform.

“How are things at home?”

“May has her hands full, and I have a black ops team. It’s classified,” she shrugs.

“You’re taking care of Lola, right?” he asks, smiling, running his hands over her bodywork.

“Of course. She’s my girl,” she says fondly, mirroring his movements, a loving expression on her face as her hand traces over Lola’s lines.

“I was wrong,” he starts, now that’s she’s closer to him. “I shouldn’t have shut you out.”

“I understand now. It’s what you do when you’re SHIELD, right?”

“Couldn’t say,” he says, putting his hands in the pockets of his jeans.

“I’m not SHIELD anymore.”

 

\\\\\\\

There’s something familiar about her voice, and he can’t quite put his finger on it.

The connection between the Rising Tide and this social media “superhero”, however, is only a cryptographic signature away.

And they’re closing in on it.

Still. He feels…different.

Not that anyone really cares.

Okay, Fury cares, because he cheated death and got a really cool plane and his own team.

He’s sure Nick has his reasons, and he doesn’t always explain them, they tend to get woven into whatever his endgame is.

Not that he thinks like that, but he has to believe he’s not just a problem that needs to go away.

It means something.

It has to.

Ward slides open the door to the van, and she’s younger than he expected.

“Hey, what up?”

For some reason.

 

////

“I’m not complaining.”

“You’re a consultant, Phil.”

“True,” he says, glancing around the spartan space. “How big is your room?”

“I’ll show you,” she says, staring at him silently until he drops his bag on the floor.

He follows her down the narrow hall of the base and hears the sounds of people in their bunks getting ready to turn down.

Her people.

They arrive at the last door on the end.

“Enter,” she says politely, holding the door for him, and he does, then waits until she closes it behind them.

“It’s nice,” he says, looking around at the ordered chaos. Piles of books and files and laptops running simultaneously.

It’s the same size as his.

“Are you done looking? There’s more. If you’re still curious.”

She’s leaning against the door, watching him. Waiting.

“Show me everything,” he answers, putting his hand up on the door beside her as she pushes herself up taller against it.

Feeling her fingers on the back of his neck already feels like permission, but he waits, with his eyes closed, until her lips softly brush against his to part them.

Then he moves against her, pressing her up against the door, his mouth against hers for the first time.

It’s so different from any version of this he’d imagined. It’s real.

He’s different now and he’s compromised.

So is she.

Forgetting that was his biggest mistake.

He needs to hear her voice right now.

He gets on his knees.

 

\\\\\\\

“Come back. Come back. Come back.”

He wants to die.

He wanted to die.

He deserved it. Everyone he failed. The people he left behind.

But that voice. Calling for him again.

He can’t die.

Not yet.

“Skye. Skye. Skye.”


End file.
